‘90s FAMILY : Youthful Desire : The adolescent years can bring on tumultuous bouts of depression and jealousy, plus headaches and insomnia. And that’s just among some <i> parents</i> .
Wrinkles and sagging tushes. Career defeats and personal failures. Age-released soul-searching and deadbeat marriages. These ravages of midlife have been known to inspire more than a few personal crises.
But research has identified a new culprit, something that can ignite middle-age angst like a match on gasoline. And it might be raiding your refrigerator right now.
Enter the adolescent, whose pubescence could be more hazardous to his parents’ mental health than it is to his own.
“The prevailing belief is that adolescence involves painful change only for the child, but it takes a much bigger toll on the parents’ mental health,” says Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor and co-author of “Crossing Paths: How Your Child’s Adolescence Triggers Your Own Crisis” (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
“Adolescence catapults parents into a life review. . . . The child moves into an age period that, in our youth-oriented society, is considered the most attractive, vibrant and desirable. It serves as a reminder to the parents that there are footsteps behind them,” Steinberg says.
“We talk about the natural history of childhood, but there is also a natural history of parenthood and what is normal in terms of self-image and relationships,” says Lawrence Kutner, a contributing editor of Parents magazine. “Parents need a perspective on what is going on not only with their child but with their family and between adults. They sometimes forget how child rearing affects them.”
Steinberg and seven other researchers tracked a random sample of 200 families with a firstborn child going through adolescence over a three-year period. They found that almost half of 360 mothers and fathers reported feeling anxious, depressed, less happily married, dissatisfied with work and less confident during their child’s adolescence. Many also suffered from psychosomatic illnesses: headaches, insomnia and gastrointestinal problems.
Steinberg says most parents and children pass through their respective transitions without tumult. But, he says, the chances that a fortysomething parent of a 13-year-old will go through a crisis is far greater than it is for a fortysomething parent of an 8-year-old.
“Having an adolescent around when you are going through midlife amplifies everything,” Steinberg says. “Your marriage may be on the decline, and seeing your adolescent dating and falling in love may make you jealous. One father said, ‘I am finally at the point in my life where my son has more fun than me.’ One woman made the remark that when she was walking down the street with her daughter, it was her daughter that all the men were looking at, not her.”
Jealous parents appear to be rare, Steinberg says, but because most parents don’t admit or aren’t conscious of such feelings, estimates are elusive. More easily measured are feelings of being abandoned by the adolescent child, a loss of control, regret about not spending enough time together when the child was small, and overall familial stress and dissatisfaction.
Parents with same-sex children are most vulnerable to the crisis because gender identification lends itself to a revisitation of lost youth. For some, that leads to parental efforts to ensure a teen-ager has what the parent never had. Others regret unrealized dreams or opportunities in the face of a child’s accomplishments and promise. For some, a child whose physical prowess surpasses theirs serves to exacerbate feelings of aging. What is more brutal than your 14-year-old slaughtering you at tennis?
Mothers and adolescent daughters fight more than teen boys do with either parent, Steinberg says, but mother/daughter pairs are also more affectionate and intimate. Mothers are also more dramatically affected by a child’s adolescence, due in part to their deeper involvement in child-rearing. When their teen-ager pushes them away, argues or spurns nurturing gestures, it can be painful. Half of mothers in Steinberg’s study reported taking a turn for the worse psychologically, compared to one-third of fathers.
Steinberg finds that some divorced mothers tend to bond to their daughters like girlfriends--shopping and going to movies--and feel left out when their daughters pull away to be with peers. Single mothers tend to feel they are losing control as their sons grow physically larger. And mothers who are not employed outside the home are more vulnerable to feeling obsolete as their child grows independent. Fathers are less at risk, but those who have made potent emotional investments in their children and have few outside interests are also vulnerable to distress as their children grow up.
“Job satisfaction is a very important buffer to possible adverse effects of this change,” Steinberg says. “It isn’t just having a job or being married but enjoying it. The job was where many parents could exercise control, power and feel good about themselves when they felt things were unraveling at home.”
That unraveling is sometimes provoked by the constants of puberty and adolescence: the de-idealization of Mom and Dad (“Omigod, my parents are idiots”) the development of cognitive skills (Teen: “Dad, you are way off base on the pros and cons of managed health care versus single-payer plans”) and the sexual development of adolescent bodies.
“The subtext is that parents just feel less powerful, period,” Steinberg says. “And if you don’t have a lot of power at work, [adolescent independence] feels a lot more threatening. Blue-collar fathers of sons often have a difficult time during this period.”
Marriages suffer during adolescence too, according to studies that show a decline in conjugal satisfaction during a child’s adolescence.
One hypothesis is that after 12 to 15 years of marriage, a dip is normal. Childless couples also report a decline in marital satisfaction but the drop is not as dramatic. Steinberg says that adolescence strains marriages because parents argue more with their child and are in a lousy mood because of it. That bleeds into marital relations.
Adolescence also introduces a whole range of new issues to battle over: how to handle dating, potential sexual activity, curfew, drug use and general-rule making. Parents don’t always agree. Adolescence also creates more free time for spousal togetherness. Depending on how you feel about your mate, this can be a boon or a disaster.
As children approach adolescence--about 12 for girls, 14 for boys--parents need to be aware that it is a period of profound change for the whole family, not just the teen-ager.
“Adolescence is a Rorschach parents project onto,” Steinberg says. “It’s the end of an important chapter in the parents’ lives, and depending on the parents, they see it that way or they see it as the end. The most important thing for parents to do during their child’s adolescence is to have a satisfying and fulfilling life of their own.”
So before your 15-year-old tells you, “Get a life!” you may want to do it yourself first.
